


role reversal

by littlebreadrolls



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Besotted Hannibal, Dark Will, Hannibal is Not a Cannibal, M/M, Will is the Chesapeake Ripper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-14 21:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11792019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlebreadrolls/pseuds/littlebreadrolls
Summary: Will is the Chesapeake Ripper. Hannibal is not a cannibal.Not yet anyway.





	role reversal

**Author's Note:**

> I'm imagining an AU where Hannibal's whole family lives and he had a normal childhood. And Will is the Chesapeake Ripper. 
> 
> Also, I just finished watching Hannibal a few weeks ago and I've been gradually growing more and more obsessed with this show ever since, so much so that I just made a tumblr account for the first time (littlebreadrolls) which I don't know how to use. Who do I follow?? How do I tumblr??

 

Will is, as usual, late for dinner. He finally arrives hollow-eyed and disheveled, slick with rain, tracking dirt all over Hannibal's immaculate floorboards.

"Sorry," he mutters, dropping his messenger bag by the front door. He lets Hannibal help him out of his coat. "I fell asleep. I've kind of been running on fumes lately."

"It is of no concern. It is good that you managed to get some rest, Will."

_I worry about you,_ Hannibal almost adds, but he is afraid that his words will come out too tender. His words have a habit of doing that, when he talks to Will. It's unfortunate, as Will seems to view any sign of emotional attachment as a sort of trap – as something that would curtail his own defiant, prickly independence. Hannibal hangs Will's dripping coat up a safe distance from his own, and when he turns back around, he finds Will frozen in exactly the same position as he was before. His gaze is blank. His curls smear in wet ringlets down his temples.

"Will." Hannibal goes over to him and rests a hand gently on his shoulder. "Don't go into your mind."

Will blinks up at him owlishly, as if coming out of a dream. "I was thinking about the case."

"I know."

Will stretches up and kisses Hannibal on the lips. A ball of warmth gathers, low and sweet,  in Hannibal's stomach.

"What's for dinner?" Will murmurs. His breath is hot against Hannibal's mouth. "I'm starving."

 

They're having a rich, creamy dish of spanakopita. Will pokes at the delicate layers of filo dough with his spoon.

"No meat?" he says.

"Not today."

Will's expression is less than enthusiastic. Though Hannibal himself has no particular fondness for meat, he knows that Will's tastes run counter to his own; the noises he makes over Hannibal's steaks and stews and lamb chops are always perfectly indecent. Still, Will has never had the luxury of being a picky eater; he raises a spoonful of spanakopita to his lips without protest. At the first bite, his eyes flicker closed. He chews eagerly. Swallows. Hannibal watches the rhythm of Will's jaw – the smooth roll of his throat – with such an avid intensity that he leaves his own dish momentarily untouched.

"It's good," Will concedes finally. His eyelashes are dark on his face. He licks a bit of ricotta from his bottom lip. "It's really good. I'm usually not one for vegetarian food, but ... "

"I'm glad to hear that you approve," Hannibal says. He speaks with perfect composure. He is gleefully, blisteringly pleased. "However, I will be sure to take your tastes into account for our next dinner. Do you have a preference for the type of meat, Will?"

Will takes another large bite, and washes it down with a gulp of wine. "Pork," he says. "But I tend to like my meat fresh. If possible, I hunt my own."

"What do you hunt?"

"Ah, everything. Deer, ducks. Whatever's in season. Mostly, I like hunting hogs, though. Have you ever encountered a hog, Dr. Lecter?"

"I haven't had the pleasure."

"Louisiana had a lot of 'em. They're mean things. They breed like hell, too, and they're an ecological disaster wherever they go. My dad used to take me out on hunting trips when I was a boy, and we'd almost always bag one or two. There's no closed season for hogs."

"Is that why you enjoy hunting? Because it reminds you of your father?"

"Mm, no, I don't think so. I don't need any more reminders of my father." Will pauses to swallow down another few bites of food – too quickly, like he's surprised by how hungry he is. "I enjoy it for a lot of reasons. I like the feeling of – well, not of killing, exactly. I like that I have the ability to transform something into – into nourishment. Into something useful."  Will's already polished off half of his plate in the blink of an eye; in him, poor table etiquette is exasperatingly charming.

_I'll feed him as he deserves to be fed,_ thinks Hannibal indulgently, and takes a bite himself. Unlike Will, he eats slowly – savoring it.

"Does it make you think worse of me? That I hunt?" Will asks suddenly.

"Why would it?"

"A lot of people don't like hunting. They think it's just an opportunity for humans to indulge in their more, eh, beastly instincts. And I'm already considered beastly enough." Will laughs. His laughter is – as it almost always is – unnervingly harsh, like it's being squeezed out of him in great pulses.

"Do you agree with them?" Hannibal says, his tone genuinely curious. "Do you think yourself  beastly?"

Will waves a vague hand and takes another over-large bite. "I see inside of monsters, Dr. Lecter. Some part of me must resonate to their tune."

Hannibal hums. He doesn't contradict Will. He doesn't hide the way that he stares at Will's mouth as he chews.

Will has a second helping, and then a third, and drinks copious amounts of wine all the while, so that by the time dinner is over, he's flushed and loose-limbed. They go to the living room. As Hannibal tends to the fire, Will sinks onto the sofa with a groan. He's snagged his messenger bag from the foyer and let it drop at his feet. A sheaf of files and photos have spilled out across the carpet: small windows of red blood and dead eyes.

"You brought your work with you," Hannibal says, disapprovingly. He comes and sit down beside Will, who immediately curls up against his shoulder.

"I bring my work with me everywhere." Will yawns, taps his temple. "In here. In my dreams."

Hannibal wraps an arm around Will's shoulders and stretches down with the other to gather up the fallen papers. There is a photo resting on the very top of the stack. It is –

"Jeff Mittlestaedt," Will slurs dreamily against Hannibal's collarbone. "Thirty-four years old. Veterinarian. Divorced two times but no children. A few DV charges on his record. Was accused of participation in a dog-fighting ring, but got off with community service. Died on the 17th, cause of death – well. Take a look. Should be clear enough."

Will laughs again. The sound of it raises the hair on the back of Hannibal's neck.

Hannibal does take a look – a long, lingering one. The cause of death is indeed exquisitely clear. Before them, the man, Jeff Mittlestaedt, lies gnawed open – torn apart in shreds and rags – as if by the teeth of dogs. His face is pulpy and unrecognizable. His hands are lumps. The cavity of his chest has been pried open with the keen precision of a human, and his heart –

"The heart has been torn out," Hannibal observes.

"Mm-hmm."

"It is the work of the Chesapeake Ripper, then."

"Yeah. His signature. Ugly stuff."

"Is it?" Hannibal murmurs.

_It's the ugliest thing in the world,_ Will told Hannibal once about killing. That was soon after their little 'conversations' in Hannibal's office first began. Will's voice trembled as he spoke, and his eyelashes fluttered delicately in anguish, and his fingers clenched white on the arms of Hannibal's armchair – and Hannibal looked at him then and knew, with perfect clarity, that it was a lie, a wonderfully crafted performance. Somewhere, behind his faltering, shell-shocked facade, Will Graham kept the fragments of his truest self. Hannibal yearned to glimpse them.

"Is it?" he repeats, looking down at Jeff Mittlestaedt. "Do you really think it ugly?"

Though he spoke distractedly, absorbed in the picture and in his own thoughts, Will's reaction is instantaneous; he ducks away from under Hannibal's arm. The sleepiness is gone from his face. He looks fiery like this, and charming.

"What do you mean by  that, doctor?"

Bemused, Hannibal raises an eyebrow. He tries to draw Will in closer again. Will allows it, after a cold moment of resistance; he allows himself to be drawn, allows his face to tuck itself back into Hannibal's shoulder, allows his stiff arms to relax by increments. Finally, he heaves out a breath that releases the tension from his body.

"Sorry," he mumbles. "I didn't mean to – I get kind of – I get defensive … "

It's especially clear in moments like this how accustomed Will is to being feared, if not outright disliked. Of course, people wonder at the way he gets inside of killers – wonder if it means that the killers can get inside of _him_ too. How tragic, thinks Hannibal, that no one has ever admired Will the way he deserves to be admired.

"Did you suspect me of mocking you?" Hannibal asks, in a low, fond tone. "Of casting aspersions upon your character? Surely not. Surely you must know by now that I couldn't view you as anything other than wonderful."

Will snorts – but he is pleased. He might be blushing. Hannibal strokes the curve of Will's neck with his right hand. With his left, he runs a thumb over the glossy photo, the dead man's heartless chest. He says, looking down at it, "I asked because I myself do not find it to be so."

"You don't find it – ?"

"Ugly."

For a moment, Will is silent. "What do you find it then?"

"Raw." Hannibal purses his lips. "Beautiful."

It has been a long time since death was any sort of novelty for Hannibal. After all, he was a surgeon at one time in his life. He sliced open skin and sewed it up again. He put his hands inside of people, and carved out what was making them die. Sometimes, he fantasized about carving out more than he should. Sometimes, despite his work, his patients died anyway. He feigned grief after these incidents, of course – but in truth, he never did feel any. Why should he? He knew that he was the best at what he did, that no other doctor could have done any better. For some patients, the best was simply not good enough. Some patients, it seemed, were simply fated to die.

Fate, he discovered in those years, was perfect in its impartiality; saints were no more likely to live than sinners. It was, in its own way, admirable.

These days, he tells his friends that he became a psychiatrist because the morbidity of hospital work distressed him. In a way, it did. The ugly banality of IVs and tumors, of tissue rendered anemic under the blinding hospital lights, was tempting and unsatisfying at the same time – like tickling an itch rather than scratching it. His work was a tease. It was never quite enough.

It was never like what he sees in the picture now: a beautiful, glorious riot of blood and ragged flesh.

From the corner of an eye, Hannibal glimpses Will raising his head and staring up at him closely – the way he might stare at a crime scene. Hannibal wonders what it is that Will is seeing. Does he suspect how often Hannibal fantasizes of death? Are the memories of his operating room daydreams bleeding right from Hannibal's eyes? No, surely not. Hannibal likes to think that he is at least as good as hiding as Will is at seeing.

But maybe that's a delusion on his part.

Whatever it is that Will sees, it makes him snatch the photographs and papers from Hannibal's hands and toss them carelessly on the coffee table.

Then he leans in and crushes their mouths together.

It's not a chaste kiss. It's biting and open-mouthed. Will's teeth catch on the fleshy bow of Hannibal's upper lip, and his tongue licks in boldly against Hannibal palate. At times, it seems as if he sheds an outer layer of skin; his downturned eyes and awkwardly trembling hands fall away, revealing something much closer to a predator underneath. Closing his eyes, Hannibal thinks of last Sunday, when they made out like teenagers on Will's narrow, dog-hair-ridden bed. He thinks of how Will's eyes grew manic and unguarded and so, so honest; how he pushed Hannibal down on his back and dug his nails into his suit, bearing his teeth in a gleaming snarl; how he looked almost as if he wanted to _mutilate_ him –

Hannibal grabs hold of Will around his waist and yanks him onto his lap. He is, quite suddenly very aroused. Will has this effect on him as well. They grind against each other, huffing and clinging, and then Will claws open Hannibal's fly and cups him through his boxer briefs. Hannibal has to break the kiss and tip his head back on his shoulders. Can't help a lush, low groan from escaping him.

"Do you know what I think, doctor?" Will says softly, panting hotly in his ear. "I think you're rather lonely, underneath your fine suits and elegant dinners and refinements. I think there are thoughts which well up in the deepest parts of you" – Hannibal bucks his hips up against him, just once, and Will stutters – "th-thoughts that – that you can't tell anyone – that no one else would understand."

He reels himself up onto his knees, depriving them both of contact. His hair curls prettily over his temples and his mouth is turned upwards at the corners; it's a smile wholly unlike the pained, cringing smiles Will usually give. It's a smile that says: _yes, I can look inside of you._

_Look_ , Hannibal invites him with his eyes, with his bared throat, _look_.

Will swoops down and sucks a mark into the skin below Hannibal's jaw. It will be too high to be hidden with clothing. Hannibal will have to buy a cosmetic product to cover it. Perhaps he'll call his sister.

"You say that you can't see me as anything but wonderful," Will says, licking lazily at Hannibal's Adam's apple – and, oh, Will's _tongue_ – "but that doesn't preclude you from seeing me as a beast, does it? Is that why you like me, Dr. Lecter? Because you think you recognize something monstrous inside of me?" 

"Perhaps I recognize something of myself in you," Hannibal murmurs, his eyes blissfully closed.

Will's hand delves down under the waistband of Hannibal's underwear. His rough palm curls around the slick head – too tightly. Hannibal hisses. Will laughs – a bright, hard thing – and Hannibal stares up at him in awe through half-lidded eyes. His beautiful Will, so wild like this, so raw and open.

"A lot of people are afraid of me," Will says. "They think I'm liable to snap at any second. Become a killer."

"Yes."

"Are you afraid of me?"

"No."

He bites Hannibal on the softest part of his neck. "You should be," he says tenderly.

_Yes,_ Hannibal tells himself, _perhaps I should be._

The thought fills him with elation.

**Author's Note:**

> I'M SORRY NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENED IN THIS FIC. Just some making out between friends.


End file.
